AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU's

[Larry Shelby]

32 Cores - 64 Threads - Read here

https://www.pcmag.com/review/372078/amd-ryzen-threadripper-3970x

Edited November 25, 2019 by cclarry

[InstrEd]

Coming next year a 64 core 128 Thread monster coming early 2020 too!

Wow for a ITB mixing machine I bet it would be sweet but expensive!

https://liliputing.com/2019/11/amds-64-core-ryzen-threadripper-3990x-processor-coming-in-2020.html

[Larry Shelby]

Indeed!  This one is $1999!

[Zo]

specially made for CLA mix hub and IK tapes lol

[Jim Roseberry]

Read the fine print.  ?

 

"According to a leaked product slide shared to Chinese social media, the Ryzen Threadripper 3990X is expected to be a 280 watt processor with 288MB of total cache. Interestingly, that’s the same TDP as AMD’s 24-core and 32-core Threadripper chips, despite having twice the core count.

That probably means the individual CPU cores will run at lower clock speeds. But the sheer number of cores could help… VFX pros, I guess. Most users would probably be hard-pressed to find tasks that require more than 32-cores… but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before developers come up with applications that can leverage all the resources of AMD’s new high-end processors."

 

Low clock-speed (regardless of the number of cores) makes this chip less desirable for DAW purposes.

 

Edited November 25, 2019 by Jim Roseberry

[Jim Roseberry]

If AMD really wants to compete, they have to get the clock-speed up... and not just on a single core.

i9 is besting Ryzen significantly on clock-speed.  Especially when you look at the speed across all cores.

ie:  The 9900k will comfortably run all 8 cores (16 processing threads) locked at 5GHz.

Ryzen can't get anywhere near that clock-speed... and especially not across all cores.

 

For the record, I have nothing against AMD.

If/when they're the overall better CPU for DAW purposes, we'll be happy to use them.

[Some Guy]

AMD is more optimal for tasks like Video Editing.  For Audio, I'd definitely go Intel.  Same for gaming.

For software development, both are good.  The high thread count in Ryzen/Threadripper at lower prices make them a great choice for that.  Compilers usually love having more processor cores/threads.

[Paul Young]

 I was turned off by the 280 watts used to power this.

[musical]

23 minutes ago, kitekrazy said:

 I was turned off by the 280 watts used to power this.

To be fair, this processor makes the MVS mainframe I used to work on occasionally that held the largest commercial database in Western Europe look crap.

That computer was housed and mirrored in two massive buildings and had its own substation.

I think it is amazing that something of this power can be run off an ordinary plug and use less power than a vacuum cleaner.

[TerraSin]

@Jim Roseberry what are your thoughts on the 3950X? It seems they've resolved a lot of the latency issues that once plagued them and the clock speeds seem decent and hold across the cores from what I've seen so far.

Edited November 26, 2019 by TerraSin

[Jim Roseberry]

16 hours ago, TerraSin said:

@Jim Roseberry what are your thoughts on the 3950X? It seems they've resolved a lot of the latency issues that once plagued them and the clock speeds seem decent and hold across the cores from what I've seen so far.

3950x is a step in the right direction... but it's not yielding clock-speeds equal to Intel's i9 series.

If you've worked with Ryzen CPUs, you know they don't have much OC headroom.

Prior to the release of the 3950x, I suspected the 3950x wouldn't be able to run all 16 cores anywhere near the max turbo frequency of 4.7GHz.

That's been the case with every Ryzen release (thus far).

 

The 9900k will easily run all 8 cores (16 processing threads) at 5GHz.

Completely stable... and with quality cooler it'll do so while running near dead-silent

 

Intel is releasing the i9-10980xe (18-cores, 36 processing threads, price will be ~$1000) and it can achieve 4.7GHz across all cores.

This is the replacement for the 9980xe (same number of cores)... but it'll be half the cost and can achieve higher clock-speed.

 

Something to keep in mind...

CPU Core performance doesn't scale 1:1

IOW, Doubling the number of cores doesn't double performance.

Having more cores is beneficial... but not at the expense of significant clock-speed.

If AMD releases a 64-core CPU... and the clock-speed is ~3GHz (meaning across all cores), that's going to be a significant performance hit compared to something like the 9900k (which is about a quarter the cost).

 

Where Ryzen shines is heavily multi-threaded applications like video rendering.

If you've got a machine doing nothing but video rendering, the 3950x is a perfect choice.

 

If you're working with audio, not all processes in a DAW can be multi-threaded.

• Playing/monitoring in realtime thru Helix Native at 96k using a 32-sample ASIO buffer size (1ms round-trip latency) is not something that lends itself to being heavily multi-threaded.  
• Some plugins like UVI Falcon only use a single core.

This is why clock-speed is (still) extremely important.

 

From our perspective (building DAWs for clients), it's not enough for AMD to release a CPU that's about the same cost and almost the same speed.

• Aside from video, Intel takes most benchmarks
• Going AMD means giving up Thunderbolt

If things are about equal, we'll stick with Intel.

If/when Ryzen (or whatever future name) is clearly superior on all facets (especially as relates to DAWs), that's when we'll use AMD.

 

 

 

[Patrick Derbidge]

I just wanted to jump in and give some information that I think is missing here about the new Ryzen launch. Since this is my first post I'm sure it will come across as trolling or fanboish but some people here will recognize me as a long time member over at the VI Control Forums and can certainly vouch for me.

While it is true that the 9900k can clock higher than the Ryzen 3700x, 3800x or 3900x- there is actually more to the story with clock speed than just the clock speed number. There is a thing called IPC. The difference between clock speed and IPC is this (stolen from a tech website) "While clock speed tells you how many cycles a CPU can complete in a second, IPC tells you how many tasks a CPU can conduct in each cycle." What AMD has been able to do is actually outperform Intel's IPC which means that with a clock speed of 4.6GHz it can match or beat an Intel at 5GHZ. 

I think I'm too new here to be able to post links but search over at scanproaudio for Dawbench results and you'll find that the 3700x comes very close to an overclocked 9900k and a 3900x clocked at all cores 4.3GHz will actually beat the 9900k all core clocked at 4.9GHz, and yes this is a DAW performance test. You can find the test under the July 2019 archive titled "AMD Ryzen 3600, 3700X & 3900X DaWBench tested – 3 is it the magic number?" There are two graphs of measurements. One that shows DSP performance at various buffer sizes. This is basically for those who use mostly VST's which will be more CPU intensive and the other test will show VSTi performance which is going to be more memory intensive.  It is interesting to note that the 3900x has more latency communication between dies since they are basically separate sets of chips with multicore (think of two separate multithreaded CPU's on one silicon) vs the 3800x/3700x or even the Intel 9900k which are one chip with multicores. That's not very technical but I hope it makes sense. Point is, that because of the efficiency of the IPC  it is able to make up for the poor latency of that particular chip (talking about the 3900x).

Regarding Thunderbolt- AMD has added support on their X570 chipset for Thunderbolt but so far only Asrock has taken advantage of that so if you get an Asrock board you can have Thunderbolt support. I do, however, see a shift moving towards USB-C which I think is where most Audio interfaces will end up. Also the USB 4 spec adds support for Thunderbolt. It will be interesting to see if there will be TB to USB adapters that will allow older thunderbolt devices to work with USB4.

After a lot of testing and research, I myself decided to go with a 3700x and it is doing a great job. Having said that, my bottlenecks were more memory and Hard Drive than CPU since I do a lot of Virtual Instruments. I invested into SSD's and extra memory. All you need to do is load one of your more intensive projects and fire up your DAW's performance monitor to see where your bottle neck is. I would also argue that due to the price of X570 boards that the cost of building a 3700x system is about the same as a 9900k system but since CPU clock speed was not a big bottleneck for me I opted to get the better multi-threaded performance but still the 9900k overclocked to 5GHZ on all cores technically beats the 3700x. On the other hand the 3900x beats the 9900k in all DAW tasks and you might want to go with a 3700x with the idea of upgrading to a 3900x in the future.

IMHO I think that the Intel 8700k and 9900k are the only CPU's left by Intel worth investing in. Otherwise I would go AMD. And this is coming from a big Intel Fan. I do hope Intel comes out with a Ryzen killer but for now AMD is seriously giving them a run for their money and I'm surprised that they haven't really come out with an answer to Ryzen yet. What I do like about what Intel is doing right now is their focus on lower powered CPU's. I think they recognize that the larger market is in the mobile space and improving the mobile platform will eventually lead to us all abandoning our desktops. It may take 5 years for that to happen for me but I think it's coming.

Edit: I know I've only discussed the non-threadripper cpu's but the same logic should apply to the Threadrippers as well and as far as I've read the new I9's have not addressed any improvement in IPC performance, in fact I think the IPC got worse. The saving grace for Intel is that they can overclock quite well because if they couldn't they would not compete with the new AMD's. Nevertheless it is impressive to see how lower clocked Ryzen's can meet or beat an overclocked Intel.

 

Edited November 27, 2019 by Patrick Derbidge

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

On 11/27/2019 at 8:47 PM, Patrick Derbidge said:

 I myself decided to go with a 3700x and it is doing a great job

Hi Patrick

I myself am leaning toward the 3700x for my next DAW build. I do a mixture of styles for Library music so some is EDM - Future Bass - etc  where I might use Serum / Massive/ Nexus but others are more Hybrid Trailer styles with some  orchestral Kontakt Libraries  like Albion One,  Symphobia, Keepforest etc.

I was just interested to know what sort of stuff you have been using it for and how it performed ? I would say most of my tracks have up to 100 VST plugins and somewhere between 10 - 20 VSTi's either Kontatk based or virtual synths and a handful of audio tracks if I record anything live or import refernce tracks.

Currently I have an i5 2500 which must be coming up to 10yrs old with 16gb ram , a 240gb SSD for Win7 and Cakewalk and couple of 2TB spinners one that holds my Kontakt Libraries and samples and another for backup / archive stuff. It's been good but I can't run enough Kontakt instruments at one time with low latency to write with the proper sounds so I end up using TTS1 to sketch it out and then change all the sounds later on the highest latency setting to preserve CPU and I almost always have to track freeze a bunch of stuff halfway through the mix.

Can I ask which speed of DDR4 you went for ? And did you get an NVME SSD  and was it PCIE gen 4 as that's and advantage of the X570 chipset as I understand it ?

Also did you go with the stock wraith cooler or have you upgraded it and also how many watts is you PSU rated at ?  Sorry for so many questions ! Mark 

( PS - You can hear some of my tracks here to get an idea of what I am using it for )

 _

[Patrick Derbidge]

1 hour ago, CosmicDolphin said:

Hi Patrick

I myself am leaning toward the 3700x for my next DAW build. I do a mixture of styles for Library music so some is EDM - Future Bass - etc  where I might use Serum / Massive/ Nexus but others are more Hybrid Trailer styles with some  orchestral Kontakt Libraries  like Albion One,  Symphobia, Keepforest etc.

I was just interested to know what sort of stuff you have been using it for and how it performed ? I would say most of my tracks have up to 100 VST plugins and somewhere between 10 - 20 VSTi's either Kontatk based or virtual synths and a handful of audio tracks if I record anything live or import refernce tracks.

Currently I have an i5 2500 which must be coming up to 10yrs old with 16gb ram , a 240gb SSD for Win7 and Cakewalk and couple of 2TB spinners one that holds my Kontakt Libraries and samples and another for backup / archive stuff. It's been good but I can't run enough Kontakt instruments at one time with low latency to write with the proper sounds so I end up using TTS1 to sketch it out and then change all the sounds later on the highest latency setting to preserve CPU and I almost always have to track freeze a bunch of stuff halfway through the mix.

Can I ask which speed of DDR4 you went for ? And did you get an NVME SSD  and was it PCIE gen 4 as that's and advantage of the X570 chipset as I understand it ?

Also did you go with the stock wraith cooler or have you upgraded it and also how many watts is you PSU rated at ?  Sorry for so many questions ! Mark 

( PS - You can hear some of my tracks here to get an idea of what I am using it for )

 _

All good questions.

First,  that's a great playlist. You've been busy. I need to get a playlist up there like that.

So far the 3700x is working great for me. Most of my projects have well over 100 tracks loaded with a mix VST's and VSTi's, and I mean a "lot" of them. The truth is that a CPU these days is hardly the bottleneck. Your DAW should have a "performance Meter" of some kind, at least I know that Reaper does. I suggest loading up your most demanding projects and open the performance meter and observe where your system is being hit the most. What I found, before I even upgraded my system this last year, is that my CPU was not being taxed all that much but my memory and hard drives were. This is why I didn't go with a high end Intel or AMD CPU ( I have no loyalty here, both are good.) I found that the 3700x met the sweet spot for me while giving me extra cash to spend money where it really counts, which was in SSD's and more memory. 

 

You asked: Can I ask which speed of DDR4 you went for ?

My response: I actually don't have the fasted memory. I have 64GB of 2400Mhz Corsair memory. 4x16gb sticks. Although it's true that AMD benefits from faster memory, it's not as significant as you would think. I think the best bang for the buck memory right now are 3200MHz sticks. I am more interested in upgrading to 128GB right now rather than faster memory and currently with only 4 slots for memory sticks the fastest 32GB sticks I can find are all 2400MHz but large Kontakt templates will benefit from large memory more than it will from faster memory. Kontakt just needs a place to quickly access all those samples, which is also why SSD's are great for Samples. Read speed being the more important feature in an SSD for samples than write speed.

 

You asked: And did you get an NVME SSD  and was it PCIE gen 4 as that's and advantage of the X570 chipset as I understand it ?

My response: I did get an NVME SSD for the OS drive but it was not PCIE gen 4. I honestly don't notice much of a difference in speed with the NVME drive from when I had my OS on a standard SSD Samsung drive. Maybe a gen 4 drive will make it more noticeable but I'm skeptical that it's worth the price of admission right now. I would rather get more memory and more SSD's for Samples or spend money on Studio gear than spend money on that. On a side note, when it comes to X570 boards, only Asrock is currently supporting Thunderbolt so if you want Thunderbolt on an X570 platform you are stuck with Asrock. Good news is I like Asrock and that's what I have.

You said: Currently I have an i5 2500 which must be coming up to 10yrs old with 16gb ram , a 240gb SSD for Win7 and Cakewalk and couple of 2TB spinners one that holds my Kontakt Libraries and samples and another for backup / archive stuff. It's been good but I can't run enough Kontakt instruments at one time with low latency

My response: Even with your current CPU I think you'd be surprised how much faster things will run if you upgrade your spinners to SSD's and your ram to 64GB if your motherboard is capable of it. You may know this but in Kontakt you can set the settings to favor SSD use over ram use if you don't have as much ram, so even if you just upgrade your drives to SSD's and not your memory you can tell kontakt to take better advantage of those SSD's.

One of my biggest bottlenecks was actually my first gen Scarlett 2i2. I was getting a lot of DAW crashes and having to bounce more tracks than I thought was necessary and kept having the same problem when I upgraded my PC so after a bit of trial and error I could tell that something was going on with my interface. I believe it was something failing inside the interface and not the drivers. I decided to do a cheap upgrade for the time being while I make a more permanent decision and bought a cheap Behringer UMC404HD. Despite the really crappy metering on this thing I'm really impressed with the drivers and latency. I actually prefer this over my old Scarlett and although at first the preamps don't seem as warm sounding as the old Scarlett, they are actually more detailed and precise sounding so I prefer the "midas designed" preamps over even the new Scarletts, which I believe are still using the same preamps from their first gen but with a little more gain. So far the drivers have been rock solid. It is a bit pickier though about allowing multiple audio sources at a time, for example if I have Youtube up first and then load Reaper then my Youtube audio will cut out in favor of prioritizing Reaper but if I load Reaper first and then pull up Youtube they will both work just fine. Just a small quirk but hey it's ASIO and it's cool that the new ASIO drivers these days even let you use more than one audio application at a time whereas in the old days that was just not an option.

If I were looking for a budget interface today I'd probably look at the new MOTU's "Look at those meters!"

I'm more concerned about Latency so the Presonus Thunderbolt interfaces interest me the most

 

Since we are sharing, here is a project I worked on ( that used a lot of Orchestral libraries that gave me a lot of crashes on my old system ( Intel i7 4770k with 32GB DDR3 and 7200rpm HD sample drive)  but with my new system ( AMD 3700x, 64GB DDR4, SSD Sample drive) ran just fine. I still had to buffer it at 512 to keep it smooth but it worked just fine. Would I want it to be better? Of course,  but I think the issue is more in the programming  than in the hardware and we'll just have to wait for that side of things to get better. This is not the final version where I had to revisit the vocals for sounding a bit too tinny but good enough for sharing purposes. Hopefully your not too tired of Christmas music(:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

25 minutes ago, Patrick Derbidge said:

First,  that's a great playlist. You've been busy. I need to get a playlist up there like that.

Thanks , I'm up at around 300 tracks now in varous music Libraries, it's a slow business but royalties are starting to trickle in hence the new PC

27 minutes ago, Patrick Derbidge said:

So far the 3700x is working great for me. Most of my projects have well over 100 tracks loaded with a mix VST's and VSTi's, and I mean a "lot" of them. The truth is that a CPU these days is hardly the bottleneck. Your DAW should have a "performance Meter" of some kind, at least I know that Reaper does. I suggest loading up your most demanding projects and open the performance meter and observe where your system is being hit the most. What I found, before I even upgraded my system this last year, is that my CPU was not being taxed all that much but my memory and hard drives were. This is why I didn't go with a high end Intel or AMD CPU ( I have no loyalty here, both are good.) I found that the 3700x met the sweet spot for me while giving me extra cash to spend money where it really counts, which was in SSD's and more memory. 

Yes I guess my projects would be similar, apologies I just assumed you were using Cakewalk as we are on their forum.  Fro my brief time with it Reaper does feel like a more efficent DAW, it was snappier on my system, very fast to load etc.  I tried various options when I thought Cakewalk had gone the way of the Dodo but in the end was happy that Cakewalk was saved and I figure similar results will be seen across all the main DAWs. 

My CPU is definitley the worst bottleneck, it craps out at low latency when I've still got plenty of ram and HDD use is low- I try to run everything at 256ms which is where it still feels responsive  ( roundtrip latency of 13ms )..any more than that and it's only good for mixing not playing anything.  Also my Mobo has a fault so only one stick of ram is working now.  

My Kontakt and Sample drive total of 1TB  so I guess I will have to get a large SSD for those.

42 minutes ago, Patrick Derbidge said:

My response: I actually don't have the fasted memory. I have 64GB of 2400Mhz Corsair memory. 4x16gb sticks. Although it's true that AMD benefits from faster memory, it's not as significant as you would think. I think the best bang for the buck memory right now are 3200MHz sticks. I am more interested in upgrading to 128GB right now rather than faster memory and currently with only 4 slots for memory sticks the fastest 32GB sticks I can find are all 2400MHz but large Kontakt templates will benefit from large memory more than it will from faster memory. Kontakt just needs a place to quickly access all those samples, which is also why SSD's are great for Samples. Read speed being the more important feature in an SSD for samples than write speed.

Interesting, I can probably save some budget there then as I was thinking  I should go for 3600mhz...3000 or 3200mhz will probably do the trick then.

 

45 minutes ago, Patrick Derbidge said:

I did get an NVME SSD for the OS drive but it was not PCIE gen 4. I honestly don't notice much of a difference in speed with the NVME drive from when I had my OS on a standard SSD Samsung drive. Maybe a gen 4 drive will make it more noticeable but I'm skeptical that it's worth the price of admission right now. I would rather get more memory and more SSD's for Samples or spend money on Studio gear than spend money on that. On a side note, when it comes to X570 boards, only Asrock is currently supporting Thunderbolt so if you want Thunderbolt on an X570 platform you are stuck with Asrock. Good news is I like Asrock and that's what I have.

More budget saving then, the main reason I would have gone for the X570 board would have been the PCIE4 support - otherwise I would probably be happy with  the B450 chipset  which means I can get a pre-built machine at a sensible price and like you say put the budget towards more storage & ram. I don't own anything Thunderblt related as I don't even think it was around when I bought this current machine. All my previous DAWs have been budget friendly pre-built machines off Amazon or Dell and I've never spent more than around £600 initially and then done my own tweaks & upgrades. There's a PC building company that is not too far from me where I bought my kids Ryzen 3200g system off last Christmas and it's been great. It was something like £320 and I provided my own O/s licence. They are advertising a basic Ryzen 3900x tower for £750 which is tempting although it needs about another £150 to add the NVME 512gb and up the ram to 32Gb 3200mhz which I think will probably do me to start with.  So it's a toss up between something like that or I have seen a 3700x system from a well know PC seller on Amazon for £659..again it would need another £150 throwing at it to get the extra drive and ram. Or building my own which I've also done in the past and maybe ending up with a better PSU and Mobo.

1 hour ago, Patrick Derbidge said:

Since we are sharing, here is a project I worked on ( that used a lot of Orchestral libraries that gave me a lot of crashes on my old system ( Intel i7 4770k with 32GB DDR3 and 7200rpm HD sample drive)  but with my new system ( AMD 3700x, 64GB DDR4, SSD Sample drive) ran just fine. I still had to buffer it at 512 to keep it smooth but it worked just fine. Would I want it to be better? Of course,  but I think the issue is more in the programming  than in the hardware and we'll just have to wait for that side of things to get better. This is not the final version where I had to revisit the vocals for sounding a bit too tinny but good enough for sharing purposes. Hopefully your not too tired of Christmas music(:

 Sounds very good, but yes Christmas music is banned until next December at our house ! It would be nice if I could still run my finished tracks at 256 samples. I don't know whether stretching to the 3900x would make enough difference  although it would appear to according to the DAWbench reports as there's quite a big jump up on both tests.  I need to keep it under £1k though..preferably less to keep the wife happy. She's a Mac user so if I was in her world I'd proibbaly be looking at twice as much for something half as powerful that I can't upgrade because it's soldered in !

[Patrick Derbidge]

1 hour ago, CosmicDolphin said:

More budget saving then, the main reason I would have gone for the X570 board would have been the PCIE4 support - otherwise I would probably be happy with  the B450 chipset  which means I can get a pre-built machine at a sensible price and like you say put the budget towards more storage & ram. I don't own anything Thunderblt related as I don't even think it was around when I bought this current machine. All my previous DAWs have been budget friendly pre-built machines off Amazon or Dell and I've never spent more than around £600 initially and then done my own tweaks & upgrades. There's a PC building company that is not too far from me where I bought my kids Ryzen 3200g system off last Christmas and it's been great. It was something like £320 and I provided my own O/s licence. They are advertising a basic Ryzen 3900x tower for £750 which is tempting although it needs about another £150 to add the NVME 512gb and up the ram to 32Gb 3200mhz which I think will probably do me to start with.  So it's a toss up between something like that or I have seen a 3700x system from a well know PC seller on Amazon for £659..again it would need another £150 throwing at it to get the extra drive and ram. Or building my own which I've also done in the past and maybe ending up with a better PSU and Mobo.

If you don't need thunderbolt then I think this is a good option. If you want to put  a new Ryzen cpu in a B450 then you'll need the latest Bios and that may require using and older Ryzen CPU to update the bios before putting in the new one. Luckily AMD has a program for this that is free to sign up for where they will lend you a cpu for the upgrade. I usually build my PC's from scratch which gives me piece of mind that every component is up to the standard that I want it to be but with that comes it own set of headaches like having to exchange my first CPU which came with bent pins and getting the wrong CPU cooler that covered my first PCIe slot, doh! I probably spent around $1500 for the build but that included  3 SSD's and a windows license and a Video card (cheap video card since I don't game). Point is, I think you could build a very nice system for 1K. Even the Ryzen 3600 would be a great option as you can see in the DAWbench results. I'm surprised that the Intel 9900K's haven't really come down in price much because that could've been a good option. Actually if you compare the price of a 3900x vs 9900k (at least if your building your own) they come pretty close. The main advantage of the 3900x is  multi threaded applications like video editing but in everything else they are neck in neck with Intel coming a little ahead if you overclock the 9900k.

 

1 hour ago, CosmicDolphin said:

My CPU is definitley the worst bottleneck, it craps out at low latency when I've still got plenty of ram and HDD use is low- I try to run everything at 256ms which is where it still feels responsive  ( roundtrip latency of 13ms )..any more than that and it's only good for mixing not playing anything.  Also my Mobo has a fault so only one stick of ram is working now.  

What's your audio interface? Sounds to me like that might be another bottleneck for you and not just the CPU. I was surprised that at first I was still having loads of crashes with my new build til I was able to discover it was my interface.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

5 minutes ago, Patrick Derbidge said:

What's your audio interface? Sounds to me like that might be another bottleneck for you and not just the CPU. I was surprised that at first I was still having loads of crashes with my new build til I was able to discover it was my interface.

It's a Focusrite Pro 24 DSP - Firewire on a TI chpset Belkin card as recomended

This processor was good when I had it but the Synths and the Plugins and the Kontakt instruments have all got more CPU intensive in the decade I have had it.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

I may well get this as a cheap base and do some upgrades

https://www.awd-it.co.uk/elite-amd-ryzen-9-3900x-4.6ghz-twelve-core-ddr4-business-and-home-pc-system.html

This is where I had the 3200g system from for the kids gaming and it's only about a half hour drive away if I need to go as well

 

[Patrick Derbidge]

1 hour ago, CosmicDolphin said:

It's a Focusrite Pro 24 DSP - Firewire on a TI chpset Belkin card as recomended

This processor was good when I had it but the Synths and the Plugins and the Kontakt instruments have all got more CPU intensive in the decade I have had it.

Should be a decent interface. I think mine was working fine but degraded over time which started causing issues. I had read that there was a subpar chip in the first gen Scarletts that do in fact go bad and I think that's what happened to mine. For normal use it works fine but once I started to have larger templates it crapped out. If yours works fine with an updated PC then you'll know it's still working well.

[Mark Morgon-Shaw]

3 minutes ago, Patrick Derbidge said:

 If yours works fine with an updated PC then you'll know it's still working well.

Sadly I checked the Focusrite support site and they don't support Win 10 for the Saffire series after the latest update ! Seems they changed the way the Firewire drivers work and rendered it obsolete

Edited December 31, 2019 by CosmicDolphin